marți, 18 octombrie 2011

The Winter Wellness Diet - 16

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF METABOLISMI could just tell you that in order to get healthy and lose weight eat less fat and refinedfoods. Yea, that makes sense, but I want to take a moment to explain how yourmetabolism actually works. Once again, it’s more important you know why to makechanges over what changes to make. The motivation must come from an emotionalresponse within yourself. Being told what to do by others will not take you as far astelling yourself with conviction.(14)The Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations wrote a very nice anddescriptive article explaining the basics of how food is metabolized and in what order.Here is how it works:Alcohol is burned first because we don’t store it and it’s energy intensive to convert it tofat. Amino acids are next because we don’t store those either. Next we utilize thecarbohydrates because we can only store a very small amount of those in our liver andmuscle. The conversion of carbohydrate into fat is energetically expensive (your bodydoesn’t want to do this). Lastly, fat is burned, utilized or likely stored as it is very easilystored at 96-98% efficiency. In other words, 96-98 calories of fat for every 100consumed can be easily stored .Reference that last paragraph as many times as you need to for continuous motivation.For as many times throughout the day as we are subjected to eating fat, it’s no wonderAmericans and those eating the Western diet are overweight and unhealthy.Let me break it down for you real quick. In an ideal world, our body would prefer thatwe consume little alcohol, not too much protein, mostly carbs and a little fat. Carbs andfat are what our body can store which is why alcohol and protein are burned first. Littletip: don’t eat a lot if you’re drinking, especially high fat foods.Carbohydrates (glucose) are what our body utilizes for energy. Excess carbs areconverted to fat and stored in fat tissue. The conversion takes a bit of energy, and onlyaround 2/3 of the original carbohydrate calories are stored as fat. Fat on the other handis so easy for our body to store that it utilizes fat last. If our body needs to access fat forenergy, remember that it converts it to glycogen in the liver to be released into the bloodas glucose.One more thing which I will go over after the next section is the utilization of aminoacids. They were second in line for being utilized for digestion because our body can’tstore them. However, our body “utilizing” them implies that they’ve been digested. Inthe case of meat and some dairy products that are body doesn’t digest efficiently, wedon’t utilize what we can’t digest. Therefore, our body will use what amino acids areavailable to us and move on to carbohydrates next. This leaves partially digested meatsitting in our systems, slowly making its way through. Maybe this is why colon cancersare so common...